'No Kill December:' LA Animal Shelters Aim For A Month With No Killed Cats Or Dogs

Publication/Event date: 2012-12-18Publication name: Huffington Post Los AngelesURL for more info:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/no-kill-december-la-animal-shelters_n_2326253.htmlSummary:Things don’t look good for Folie, a 4-year-old tan Chihuahua in a cage in the small dogs room at the South Los Angeles animal shelter. She presses her nose to the bars attempting to get closer to Matthew Spease, the shelter’s animal care technician supervisor, as he unlocks the latch to her stainless steel home. She is excited to get some attention from him, but her squeals of anticipation sound raspy. She’s picked up a respiratory infection, commonly known as “kennel cough,” in the month she’s spent at the shelter.

"No Kill December" is a publicity stunt designed to obfuscate the fact that our shelter system is in shambles. The shelter system is a well-oiled killing machine and everyone in the animal protection movement knows it. This is a LAAS co-branding campaign with Best Friends Animal Society, which collects more than $40 million per year in donations.

Small, financially strapped rescue orgs are scrambling to save lives. They could use some of that money being siphoned off from them in order to pay for salaries, marketing, publicists and parties. Small rescue orgs struggle to provide med care for sick, injured and fear-biting animals who would have been killed during "No Kill December." The heavy lifting is being done by very small organizations, many with fewer than a dozen volunteers, spending their hard-earned money to save lives while Barnette and Best Friends Animal Society take the credit.

We receive complaints daily that Barnette is not enforcing our spay/neuter law or illegal sales. How can they brag of "improvement" if it is concocted while we outsource animals to private shelters in order to make a fantasy appear real? Animals will be killed in January, in February, on and on until people understand that breeding, selling or buying animals is uncontionable while we kill tens of thousands of animals per year.

How is LAAS “No Kill” if animals are outsourced and rescuers picked up the slack and pay medical bills for animals who would have been killed? Isn’t that more like “No Responsibility?”